Hairy Root Cultures

Hairy root culture plays an important role in investigation of alkaloid production in culture in vitro. The complexity of scientific work and the production capacity limitations associated with whole plant systems and unorganized cells can be overcome using culture of hairy roots. This paper presents an example of a strategy to produce secondary metabolites from plants, in which we investigated the alkaloid pathway, modified gene expression, and cultivated and optimized hairy root growth in a bioreactor. Datura innoxia whole plant was transformed by Agrobacterium rhizogenes, and the obtained hairy roots were studied for their tropane alkaloid production. Optimization of medium led to an increase of scopolamine production in hairy root culture of Datura innoxia by increasing the produced biomass, but genetic engineering seems to be the best way to increase the accumulation of scopolamine. These root cultures were not able to stably overaccumulate scopolamine. The involvement of putative enzymatic regulation of the tropane alkaloid pathway is discussed.